Archive for the 'SEO' category

Google 7 Day Indexing Delay: Wordpress All in One SEO Plugin

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Many sites whose new posts were previously indexed in one day have found themselves waiting 7 day to have their posts indexed. If you are depending on AdSense revenues for visitors clicking on topical recent posts, this is a big problem. I'd imagine that would be about a 60% income drop for your site overnight.

What's causing this issue?

Longtime rogue SEO Michael Martinez is bandying about the theory that the issue is using Wordpress SEO plugins. And running around every forum in town shouting it from the rooftops.

Let me reiterate my opposition to the use of "All In One" and other SEO plugins - they are not helping any blogs with search engine optimization. They are bells and whistles, busy working gadgets....

A typical default Wordpress installation does a perfectly fine job of allowing you to configure your page titles, URLs, and content. You don't need to embed "Keywords" in meta tags and your autogenerated descriptions will be no better than whatever a search engine would provide (and the search engines will ignore meta descriptions in many queries anyway)....

There is a LOT of confusion over what you need to do with a Wordpress blog. The less you burden it with so-called "SEO friendly" features, the less likely you'll screw up your site in the search results.

If you don't know enough about search engine optimization to do it yourself, then you're really in over your head when you depend on a theme or plugin to make the decisions for you.

Installing an SEO plugin will not damage your SEO.

• Having custom handwritten descriptions can increase your clickthrough 50% or more.
• Including a good short keywords section with the 5 or 6 top tags for your post can help with Yahoo still.
• Writing a second structured title for search can really help (your article header should be written for the reader and not for search, i.e. with wordplay and puns and spin and short forms are good. Like a newspaper headline but the page title must include keywords)

So an SEO plugin can really help your SEO with minimal time and trouble.

Where Michael Martinez is quite likely right is that telling Google not to index whole sections of your website (archives, category and tag pages) and autogenerating metadescriptions is unproductive at best and dangerous at worst.

Semper Fi's All in One SEO (Semper Fi are not the original author, Uberdose is) does set all these things wrong out of the box. Very aggressive no-index, no-follow settings. So it is dangerous.

With FV All in One SEO, we took the opposite approach. The defaults are very conservative.

• No-index is turned off.
• No-follow is turned off.
• Dangerous choices are hidden in advanced options out of the way of the beginner user.

We don't even rewrite your titles by default as a good Wordpress theme should handle titles on its own.

Here's what our option screen looks like:

FV All One SEO for Wordpress options: All the advanced voodoo is hidden and out of the way:
Default options do not include any no-index or no-follow nonsense.
Do not encourage your children play with knives either.

And here is the meat and potatoes of the interface: custom titles and custom metadescription. 

FV All in One SEO post interface: We count the characters for you and even offer
useful rollover tool tips for your client or for a beginner user. The goal:
Making SEO easy for both you and your client

What Martinez is ignoring is that may sites not using Wordpress are waiting on indexing now too. So rather than ranting about Wordpress SEO plugins, Martinez should be on the war path against no-index, no-follow, risky use of robots.txt and autogenerated content.

And Michael, if you want to offer the benefits of advanced SEO for Wordpress without the risks, you can safely offer FV All in One SEO.

By Alec

SEO | No comments

Review: Distilled & SEOmoz Expert Training London Day Two

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz opens day two of SEO Pro Training in London

Head to Head: Keyword Strategy – Will Critchlow (Director, Distilled)

Will Critchlow beat Rand Fishkin shirt

• keyword strategy depends on how many writers you have.
  • if you have a lot of writers, long tail is great
  • if you have fewer, you will have to focus on a smaller set of keywords
• conversions by keyphrase length (excluding branded search) useful statistic
  • 2.7% on three word phrases
  • 1 word on .8%
  • two word 1.2%
• what does that mean:
  • for ecommerce: more deeper product pages. Three word keyword phrases convert like crazy.
• set up your site hiearchies: attribute/location
  1. start with full keyword list ordered by volume
  2. then divide it by category.
     • for camping, keyword phrases divide up like this:
       • in
       • or
       • with
       • friendly
     • use excel array to pull them out
       • campsites
       • caravan parks
       • holiday parks
• getting at the hidden data in your PPC data.
  1. define your report
  2. add&limit=50000 to your URL
  3. export as CSV (excel export doesn’t work)
• use the conversion data to uncover gems:
  • found four or five 3 keyword phrases which were converting like crazy for which we didn’t have pages.
• split test open rate:
  • “download the call” or “download the video” and “donload the video” won.
  • “training” vs “conference call” and “conference call” won
• based on history, anticipate event spikes for searches and get ahead in organic, i.e. world cup 2010.
• run xenu on your competitor, look at internal links, look at site structure. Find his weaknesses.
  • category pages: great category page for leather sofas but he doesn’t have 3 seater leather sofas.
  • add 3 seater leather sofa category page and watch the traffic roll in

Head to Head: Keyword Strategy – Rand Fishkin (Founder, SEOmoz)

Rand Fishkin - Keyword Strategy

• Online Marketplace
  • Google has been growing in last five years, other search engines, barely.
  • 80% of clicks from organics, 80% of SEM budget to PPC. numbers are backwards.
  • 160 billion dollars of revenue online.
    ecommerce referral: 31% organics seo, paid search 9%, social media 7%.
    wife getting the bird
  • Market is growing madly. Bought wife laptop: my zappos viewing machine has arrived.
  • Brands should pay attention to online. Offline purchases are influenced by online research.
• Search results analysis
  • 31% click blended search
  • 68% of search engine users click data on first pages.
  • does high organic ranking higher make people think you’re a better brand?
    39% agree 42% neutral 19% disagree.
  • Keyword phrase length over time: grew then contracted. Search engines got better.
    conversion rate by kw phrase length:

The charts backing Rand’s presentation are located at http://seomoz.org/dp/free-charts.

News site SEO – Rob Ousbey (Search Marketer, Distilled)

Rob Ousbey - News site SEO

Rob started his presentation by quoting Richard Murdoch:

“The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph

News sites’ USP are dependent on the following factors:

• brand & age
• variety
• contentcreators

What’s special about new sites?

• regular new content
• old expiring content (go to archives or deleted)
• varied conversions

Some big stories can be planned: Obama inaugration.
Other big stories are unplanned: Michael Jackson’s death.

In news, one of the best ways to get ahead is to get other SEO’s to do your job by linking to your stories. You have to let people link.

Some things to be careful about:

• print version pages. Make sure that your print pages contain enough navigation to the main site.
• duplicate content: try to keep your content single URL
  • Example not to follow The New York Times.
    • times.com
    • www.times.com
    • nytimes.com
    • www.nytimes.com
• news sitemap
• If you are running a new site or even a site which publishes occasional news, you want to get into Google news. The technical requirements include about 15 items.
• When trolling for new topics, use the suggest feature on google news: updates quickly to see what people are looking for.
• Tag your images right: 10% of organic traffic and image visitors are some of the best.
  • new visitors
  • more page per views per visit
  • lower bounce rate

You want to be among the early links on Google. Read Brent Payne’s personal weblog, he’s director of seo for Chicago Tribune.

Some more tips:

• new URLs for hot topics
• find volcanic topics
• create relevant content
• published optimised page at new URL: double visit from Google for news page and comes back a second time to pick up corrections: speed is of the essence come back and correct it.
• be sure to link from related pages and home page. Build it into your CMS
• 301 related but outdated content (immediate link juice)
  rotate linking pages through front pages
• Old URLs for repurposed content

Rob spent some time breaking down the technique of repurposing old URLs using the example of Michele Obama’s dress.

• find term
• change title & description
• link to from homepage
• when story returns
• keep title, h1, h2, description, the same (otherwise loses weight)
• replace content with updated story
• link from similar content, 301 old content

Who should do all this SEO? It’s too much for a single SEO to handle.

• journalists: make them make it happen.
  • journalists will do the day to day SEO for you
  • not “jacko snuffed it” but “michael jackson died today”: you can have different header than page title. Best of both worlds. Page title: “Michael Jackson died today”; header: “Jacko snuffed it with drug overdose”.
  • how to motivate journalists?
  • two trainings not one: expect only 25% success at first training; six months down the line, 75% will do something about it
    • congratulations go a long way: copy their boss
    • analytics, dashboards, reports
    • exposing their personality: in the newspaper you can’t really add much, but online you can create special section, bio, photo

What is the difference between blog vs news?

• does it matter?
• news is reporting and blog is editorial sections.
• does the site look like a news site?

How a smaller organisation can compete…

• you cannot compete on quantity, but you can compete on editorial quality, especially if you are focusing on paid subscribers.
• the pay wall: ft.com up 10% for online and up 22% for the overall group.

How to use the pay wall and not get excluded from organic search…

• the Google News solution: first click free.
  • First click free doesn’t fix the linking problem.
• solution for external links:
  • become a premium news website
  • extend first click free to all referred traffic so your referrers can send you traffic.
  • how do the first wave of media find you: give them free content, get referrals

News Pricing

• studies show 13% of visitors are willing to pay 6-10p per article
• focus on these high value visitors for mini payments
• Rob’s suggestion: use a micropayment system Oyster with the following scheme:
  • 20p for first article
  • 20p for second article
  • cap it at 50p per day for the rest of the paper

His argument is that 50p/day is still cheaper than buying a newspaper.

How do you get people to want to pay you?

• making your content exceptional
  • turn great content into purchase
  • turn great content into links
• calls to action that match your conversion

If you are a news source, Rob points out that Wikipedia loves newspapers. go get a bunch of links to your news site.

The Pacman Chunk of the Piechart: Getting Links – Tom Critchlow (Head of Search, Distilled)

Tom Critchlow - Getting Links

Tom got started by talking about the role of your USP in both content generation and in brining in links. Your USP will change what content you post and what links that content brings.

For Tom, modern link building is not separated from strategy. In traditional SEO link building, link building could be done separately via:

• manual directory submission
• manual article submission
• social bookmark submission
• creating web 2.0 properties

His top advice is to leave those old-fasioned methods behind, let’s get away from it.

Case Studies

HamiltonBilliards – A Niche supplier of high end billiard tables

How can hamiltonbilliards beat topofthecue?

• special relationship with all of the huge national castles? get a link back!
• warwick university pool club. give them free cues, sponsor organisation, sponsor a tournament.

Hippobox

• ontracks delivery doesn’t fit into postbox, now links to hippobox
• howonearth delivery doesn’t fit into postbox, now links to hippobox

Competitor analysis

• how can you understand your USP without understanding your niche?
• basic links in each niche. get them all.
• reverse engineer each competitor’s strategies.
• identify successful strategies and repeat them (including sophisticated ones like those of Hamilton Billiards and HippoBox
  • using linkscape
  • order linkscape data by DmT (Domain moz-Trust) for quick categorisation (not so easily spoofed).

Who are your competitors? They aren’t just competing suppliers. Competitors are people who rank in your targeted SERPs.

• look for people who list other sites in directories
  • investigate the links to sites already listed in niche directories
• gingerlily.co.uk, ranked for “silk duvets”. Link from allergy.co.uk: go get links from all allergy sites.
• accountingpage.com service $50 for submission. Directory networks can be effective in the right niche.

Some people are ranking:

• for massive link buy
• for massive directory submission
• for great content and wide bookmarking

Understand why you’re building each link. There are three things links can bring you:

• authority – from top sites
• trust – from trusted sites in an area
• anchor text – from any site

Diversity of links is very important. Never rely on a single strategy or even two strategies.

Different link need scenarios:

• you might have anchor text, need trust
• you might have trust, but need anchor text strength.

Embed seo in your business processes. Example: in each thank you note for business purchases include a link request: “if you have a website, please consider placing a link”.

Make sure your PR agency is using specific pages on your website and using links in their releases.

Pay for high quality directory links. Quality paid directories are curated and somewhat exclusive so the links do have value. Example: JoeAnt speed pass.

Generic directories:

• joeant
• aviva directory

Directory Tips:

• More useful are stronger links from niche directory.
• For a crafts site, links in a craft or housetohomedirectory.
• Before paying for a link check that that directory passes link strength.

Email

If content is king, email is the pupper master pulling the strings.

A common truism: just write content and the rest will take care of itself. Perhaps but if you want to accelerate growth, you have to do some legwork for your content.

• Email some people and ask them to link. How do you motivate them?
• Don’t forget about international social media sites. Nice traffic, nice links.
• perform competitor analysis on who published competitors linkbaits or area linkbait.

Duplicate Content

• Duplicate content does not cause sitewide penalties. Back in the day, perhaps no more.
• Duplicate content does not hurt you at all if you outrank everyone who publishes your post.
• Syndicate your content for links.

Product Giveaways

• product givaways for links. get them something to do with your products.
• send product but give them something to do with it. paints=painting contest.
• for high value items, use disount codes/exclusive offers. 15% off orlebar brown swimwear. people have to link to you to write about it.

Widgets – Custom Programming

• widgets tip. syndicate exclusively to major publishers with custom branding built-in.

Paid Links

Paid links – step outside paying for them in the traditional way:

• association membership
• conference sponsorship
• charity donation

TIP: Use adwords content network to discover sites in your area who are open to publishing paid links and are in your niche. Then approach them directly for permanent advertising.

API and open data.

Often with a popular API you can get links into your site.

Affiliate Links

SEO friendly affiliate links are like paid links, but free.

• allows you to get links from sites you’d otherwise have had to pay
• pay people to put affiliate links on their website

Keep in mind that Google is trying to shut down link juice from affiliate sites so this may be a six month strategy.

Local communities

• this is bath.co.uk
• thebathweb.co.uk
• bathfm
• thebathchronicle

Expired sites

1. find expired sites in your niche
2. get a list of all the pages linking to the expired page
3. contact those site owners and suggest that they link to your replacement page instead. Most site owners would like to replace any broken or expired pages to which they link.
   • TIP: if the expired page links are affiliate, make sure to offer an affiliate replacement program.

Profit:

• long run business strategy which wins is trust
• people who win are those who build quality links. Build awesome links. Awesome links start with great content.
• people are more important than links: high ROI on engagement.
• link-savvy PR is better than traditional SEO.
• build links for traffic not for SEO.

Finding Modern Linkbuilders

Best linkbuilders Tom has seen:

• business development managers
• community managers
• developers

In long term people with business and community or special tools skillset will build you the links you want, the links which count.

SEO is Nothing Without Content – Rand Fishkin (Founder, SEOmoz)

Rand Fishkin - SEO is nothing without Content

Building the Content: Your Own and UGC (user generated content)

• copyblogger: 10 sure-fire headline formulas that work
• SEO is part of how you show your content
  • same content in focused way and it attracts people
  • wrap it with a bunch of ads and crap, it doesn’t succeed. Example: SEOmoz is non-commercial format. SEOmoz is .org: strategic.
• Nick Denton’s publishing model: Pay your writers on page views and on incoming links.
  • for every domain which links in you will pay more.
• use Amazon’s ranking system for reviewers: involve users in your site.
  • send people a badge to put on their website
  • give registered users ownership of their profile.
  • example: linkedin’s profile completeness. 5 x as much content contributed. you’re not done yet.
• give a website a vibrant community before you invite general users in
  • check answers.startups.com
    • build a community before you launch, don’t be empty
  • don’t turn weblog comments on until you have a community already. 0 comments looks terrible.
  • give them a profile worth sharing
• how to maximize UGC (user generated content)
  • seed with high quality members: why are comments good, depends on seed members
• focus on a niche, then build wide
• reward/recognize contributors: check stackoverflow for an example.
• provide analytics for users: show them page views, comments
• make it a competition

How to get people to link to your site

• Fun widgets: boozedeathcalculator from bar shot
  • post your results to your weblog, twitter, facebook, myspace: simple, simple sharing
• reward links with trackbacks
• designing content which will gain links
• use old domains and URLs.
• ranking #5 for “social media”
• measure incoming links to each page, quality: do it to your competitors
• citation will get an incoming link
• anticipation in a teaser kind of way
• humour: really hard to do right
• controversy: not a fan, but draws in a lot of links.
• how to turn a tweet into a link
  • make an embeddable link
  • close discussion on own site
  • create an expervience vs read & forget
  • don’t discount the value of a tweet: Google is seeing tweets as fresh content

Google Local Search – Tom Critchlow (Head of Search, Distilled)

Tom Critchlow - Google local search

• a lot of factors for Google ranking
  • verified listing
    • bulk upload: white listing for many locations
      • separate bulk upload files, one for each country, country selection drop-down, country selection drop down to change country each time
      • data formatting avoid: capitalisation, odd phone number formatting, URLs in the description field
    • worst thing to do: not on whitelist, not claiming your own listing, unverified edits
  • number of reviews
    • number more important than the rating
  • citations: like links only different
    • mike blumenthal (blumenthals.com) david mihm
    • citations: mentions of your brand, sometimes a link
    • phone number mention is usually a citation
    • address listed
    • how to find them? look at competitors.
  • distance to center
    • google says it doesn’t matter: it does. can’t do anything about it.
  • categories
    • can add up to five
    • use keywords
    • analyse competitors

Case Study – SEOmoz

SEOmoz doesn’t rank in google local search for “seo company seattle”

• there are four sites verified and provided by business owner.
• both addresses are also verified and provided by business owner.
• reviews of the old address
• category fail: only one there make sure you are using all five

Job number one: getting rid of the old listings and consolidating on a single listing. Job two: getting in some reviews.

Universal Search – Patrick Altoft (Director of Search, Branded3)

Patrick Altoft - Universal Search

• Google’s main results page now clogged up with all kinds of results:
  • local
  • video
  • image
• you want to try to get into those alternate results as well
• video results: up to eight results.
• put up a video sitemap: if you are a trusted site
  • get some people to give some good ratings
• google is now indexing flash as content
• imagine if you have your logo on google’s image search
• rather than buy links from weblogs, put an image on website but with logo on top.
• google images cares about the text nearby
• google news citations:
  • rectangular
  • size 250×150px
  • interesting image
  • alt text! and have it next to image
  • images will get more clicks than the headling
    • interesting image

The limits of automation – Dave Naylor (Founder, Bronco)

Dave Naylor - Limitations of Automation in SEO

Tools to Analyse

• Best single tool for tracking SERPs: Advanced Web Ranking
  • never search for your brand terms (don’t get a penalty)
  • remove them
• Google webmasters tools
• MajesticSEO
  • good backlink set
• Google wave (get everybody in)
  • can have one wave per client
  • people can get you automatically
• SEOmoz tools
• raven tools
  • best of internet into one management suite
    • post content to blogs
    • manage social profiles
    • integrates with Google analytics
• Bronco tools
  • free tools, not working don’t care
  • Geo targeting
  • like excel spreadsheet but brings it all together for you and makes it pretty
  • link recording tool
    • keep track of links
    • future links to come back and get
  • common link finding tool
• fresh tools
  • 80 legs: on demand web crawler
    • .25 per 100,000 URLs
  • backlink planner
    • automatically analyses competition for a keyword: you need 300 directory links, 50 blog comments, 100 site widgets
  • backlink analyser
    • some links are actually bringing you down
    • analyses link and shows how risky they are: some links can bring you down
    • sponsored links: you can buy a link
    • decreasing toxic links give a boost
    • not passing equity: stop paying for it
• microsoft has an SEO tool.
  • shows you the violation
  • like xenu on speed
  • check with a malware checker
  • vista and above
  • free download
• davidnaylor.co.uk special tool
  • let’s you see what’s going on
  • about to clean up toxicity and see if it makes any difference

Tools to Build: Bioware

• Picasso about computers: “they can only give you answers.”
  • human must make a decision over whether to place a link or not. must do approach not machine driven.
  • go after very high value links in a personalised way

The right strategy for your organisation – Will Critchlow (Director, Distilled)

Will Critchlow of Distilled fields QA Questions on Strategy

Possible strategies

• startup
• established
• household name

How do you differentiate yourself? Do it even as a small company.

• ranking factors
  • what you control
    • where usp helps
    • building a custom page into your sales process

Where to your links come from?

• rolex: sponsorship: 15% of links come from sponsorship
• rackspace: testimonials: 25% of links come from sponsorship
• amazon: affiliates: 25% of links come from affiliates

Desirability

• rarity (“uniqueness”)
• you can even get links for a screwup

Richard Brannson’s Virgin brand is USP

• something different from everyone else
• get links from points of difference
• everyone’s quick but you are quicker.
• as small business, pushing 2 ton flywheel. doesn’t appear to move until it does.

International Companies: How to handle multiple countries/languages – Duncan Morris (Director, Distilled)

Duncan Morris - SEO Strategies: How to handle multiple languages/countries

• Should a company develop a separate website for each country?
  • local TLD domain helps? yes.
  • difficulty of getting TLD domains
  • local TLD vs generic TLD
  • single language vs multiple language

Much easier to have a local version when you have your own domain for each one.

Bmw has a site for every country. That’s the right model.

Question and Answer Day Two SEO Expert Training

Distilled SEO Expert Training QA Panel Day 2

Danny Dover SEOmoz reading the questions submitted online

How to burn someone’s site to the ground?

• Dave Naylor: Buy him $500 of TLA links per month for a year, gradually increasing spend. Make it look like you are building a bad neighbourhood.

Distilled SEO Expert Training Question

Should video be stored on YouTube or on your own site?

• Rand Fishkin: Two versions of video. On youtube funny title, on your own site very seo’d straight title. Differentiate.
• Dave Naylor: Put main video on your own site and offer an easy embed tool directly from your own site. Get lots of extra links that way.

Dave Naylor and Rand Fishkin answer questions about YouTube videos

Pub night hosted by London SEO

London SEO pub night

• tab was still running at 10pm. Good job, London SEO.
• music wasn’t too loud to talk.

Some English SEO’s I’d met the night before were murmuring about Distilled’s comments about paid links being unequivocally bad.

I wandered over to the Distilled table and asked some pointed questions about paid links. It turns out Distilled are not as absolutist white hat as they suggested throughout the training (paid links unqualifiedly bad) but they feel the future of SEO is more in community driven links.

So why teach people a bad practice which should be playing second fiddle to good practice.

I think that’s a fair approach.

London Bus on the walk home

Hotel Russell London - a place to rest after two wonderful but long days

By Alec

SEO | 3 comments

Review: Distilled & SEOmoz Expert Training London Day One

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Will Critchlow Rand Fishkin welcome the world to London for SEO Expert Training

Introduction

As an owner of both SEOmoz Basic SEO Training DVD and the SEOmoz Advanced Training DVD, I knew that the speakers knew their stuff and they looked like a fun crowd to boot. So I decided to attend the SEO Expert Training live conference in London on October 19 and 20.

Was the trip to London worthwhile?

Definitely yes, but…

Let’s start with the program which Distilled and SEOmoz organised for us. In a word, superb. The program included dedicated sessions on:

• link building
• site structure
• social campaigns
• SEO tools
• content strategy
• conversion techniques
• SEO team management
• Google penalties and penalty filters
• Google analytics

For the most part this partial list of topics is a dreamlist of issues which I’d like to hear about in depth.

Amazing View from the Imagination Gallery

The “but” has to do with the internal structure of the conference. The conference was co-sponsored by SEOmoz and Distilled. Unfortunately for a two day conference, Distilled is just too young and small a company provide authorative speakers for all subjects.

When someone delivered a good speech on day one, there’s a good chance, he or she would follow up with a much weaker overview of another subject. Some of the speakers were too inexperienced to speak to this audience, both as an expert and as a public speaker (I’m thinking particularly of Lucy Langdon’s “ROI in Social Media”). I’m sure Lucy will get better with time, but she wasn’t quite ready yet. A number of the sessions were cribbed from well-known sources, rather than reflecting original thought. I’m thinking specifically of site structure (Jakob Nielsen) and branding strategy (USP standard advertising 101 at this point).

Distilled’s youth on the other hand yielded a big reward on another front: enthusiasm. Both the presenters and the audience were full of excitement and enthusiasm for what we do. As a group we are people who want to make the web a better place, full of stronger and more interesting sites.

For most of us, search is not just a job but a passion.

This was not an IT conference full of introverted programming types who never leave their computers and aren’t getting any exercise. While the gender ration skewed in favour of men by at least four to one, my girlfriend noted with a slight tone of surprise that those who were there are quite attractive.

SEO Expert Training audience paying close attention

Another big issue which Distilled got right was venue. We were right next to Goodge Street on the top of the Imagination gallery enclosed in glass with all of London’s Bloomsbury district just out the window. We were bathed in natural light all day long. The location was inspiring. We were just blocks away from Saatchi & Saatchi's main offices on Charlotte Street in the heart of media London. Small details like attractive platform and graphics from Distilled graphic artist Leonie Wharton made a big difference for a design type like myself.

Some complained about the five story hike up and down by foot to get a cup of coffee. To my mind, that trot up and down stairs improved the conference five fold as neither audience nor speakers ever hit that somnulent too-many-hours-in-a-chair-without-exercise drift. Drowsiness is highly contagious so by keeping everyone awake the quality of attention in the room went up, benefiting both audience and speakers.

Imagination Gallery - the view down

When we organise a conference, I’ll have some trouble finding a location with three or more flights of stairs and no lift. Perhaps we’ll have to bribe someone to take the elevator out of commission.

Advanced analytics – Will Critchlow (Director at Distilled)

Will Critchlow with Duncan Morris

Will told us how important it is to know your data and gave some great hints on how to use Excel and pivot tables to master data. This presentation seemed incredibly short to me. Perhaps I was just slow getting off the block after all the travel to get here.

Getting SEO done against the organisational odds – Richard Baxter (SEOgadget)

Richard Baxter - How to Build an SEO Team

On the other hand, Richard Baxter’s presentation was right in my area of deep interest. Building and developing an SEO team.

• a good senior SEO needs to be a good manager
  • management consultancy to directors
  • data to business modelling
  • recruiting/training
  • helping team
• Good campaign objectives are:
  • visibility
  • conversion
  • revenue (measured monthly)
  • traffic
• Segment distinctions in traffic:
  • generic = “broadband”
  • research = “best broadband”
  • purchase = “broadband deals”
• Take each segment to a different page/part of your site.
• When making estimates, tend conservative: you can only win when you exceed your targets.
• How to Structure an SEO team?
  • all requests for SEO support should go through manager
    • you protect the team from silly requests
    • you make sure workload remains balanced across the team
    • you maintain the authority within the team to shape it
    • you know what management is asking for so you can build more of it into the team
• Training a team
  • make them give presentations to you every week
  • presentation help them clarify their thoughts
• Four Segments of SEO in a team environment
  • Technical
  • Content
  • Links
  • Metric/Analysis
• Ideally you will have at least one person in each area.
  • Compartementalize! Focus.
• Recruiting SEO’s for your team
  • sell the role! you want good applicants.
  • do group interviews: Richard’s current practice:
    • bring eight candidates in
    • divide to four pairs
    • making the pairs each sell you the other one
    • hire the one who analyses and sells best
  • advertise in the right places
    • SEOmoz has a good jobs board
    • SEOgadget has a good jobs board
• Reporting to management
  • monthly reports
  • sell your services monthly with the reports
    • maintains engagement and executive support
    • keeps SEO team on their toes
• Controlling Staff
  • regular meetings
    • set questions at these meetings: if someone doesn’t have his/her figures send that person out of the meeting until they can bring them
  • team accountable for specific figures/traffic
  • set deadlines
  • set specific link acquisition targets, ie. 25 mR 4 links or 4 mR 5 links in a month (mR = mozRank)
• Toolset
  • Excel for analysis
  • Advanced Web Ranking for ranking reports (flexible, sophisticated)
  • Dafizilla Table2Clipboard for getting data out of web table and into Excel

“ROI from social media” – Lucy Langdon (Search Marketer, Distilled)

Lucy Langdon - ROI in Social Media: A bit more how to win at it next time please

• start by reading avinash’s post how to measure branding online: [this post is a bit much for a naked recommendation: I think what Lucy was trying to say is measure everything]
• social media can’t fix a broken site
  • improve your product first
• for longtail ranking you need authority links
• in social media: think BIG.
  • brainstorm properly (go to the pub)
  • use your whole team
  • steal ideas from your competitors
• Before you start a campaign, make sure you have
  • sign off
  • fixed budget
  • a strong conviction it will work [not sure about this one: social media is pretty hit and miss even for the experts: good golfers shoot lots of birdies but few holes in one]
• what posts have potential to take off:
  • data visualisation works:
  • resource lists work.
  • big images work.
  • big pictures from curent events.
  • lists work well.
• “Social media is a fickle mistress.”
• How to Track Success
  • leading indicators
    • visits
    • twitter mentions
    • visits from a specific network
    • bookmarks
    • other web mentions
• Getting It Done
  1. just write/draw//sing something
  2. now make it better
  3. get feedback
  4. make it better
  5. publishy
  6. promotion (have it all ready in advance!)
     • all outgoing emails are prepared in advance
  7. make it shareable in a practical way: buttons to click on
     • use social media buttons sparingly: just the ones which you are targeting or which will work
  8. have some free time to deal with anything that comes up on the day
  9. set your Google alerts, technorati mentions
  10. follow up bad links, bad mentions. Get negative publicity fixed within 24 hours.
  11. tracking: what did you get
      • use leading indicators to get additional support to promote further.
      • if it doesn’t work, then try to figure out what went wrong.

“Diagnosing and fixing penalties, understanding guidelines” – Jane Copland (Ayima Search Consultant, ex-SEOmozzer)

Jane Copland - Diagnosing and Fixing Penalties: Yes Virginia, there is a filter clause.

• Diagnosing and Fixing Penalties
  • Penalties are like unicorns. Rarer than you think.
  • What you are seeming most of the time are filters, not penalties.
    • Caveat: always keep in mind your site might just not be strong enough.
    • First thing to do is reanalyse your SERPs as if it was a new project.
  • Sample Penalty: overoptimisation of anchor text
    • Solution: Stop getting links which say “cheap car loans”.
    • Solution: use press releases (uses domain) to add some good links with alternative anchor text.
  • Duplicate content: rarely a penalty. But fix it so you don’t send pages to supplemental.
  • Vince update favour brands. Google got better at association.
• Avoiding penalties:
  • monitor the hell out of SERP activity: every day.
  • Watch out for any of the following.
    • bouncing SERPs
    • inability to rank higher than a certain number.
    • If you find alternate pages from your domain ranking instead: focus on alternate page instead of root page. Sometimes we’ve exhausted everything that we could to make home page rank.
• Penalty causes:
  • majority of real penalites are brought about because of undesirable linking practices.
    • TIP: removing terrible links can improve rankings!!!
  • gross on-page spam (hidden content, cloaking)
• Getting out of jail once you are in:
  • Start with: take. this. shit. seriously.
  • Humans are on the other end. Human review! Site reviewer is not excited about your problem, could care less. S/he has a long list of sites to review. Looking for a reason to deny your request.
  • Hiding content for good reason. display: none; remove all these easy fails before you file for reinclusion.
  • Human reviewer has got every tool available to google. How many phd’s do they have working at Google? Are you stupid enough to think you can outsmart them?
  • Get rid of the grey hat.
    • Sample: filthy little secrets – domain.com/links.html
    • Solution dump link exchange. At the very least remove all your dodgy links.
  • TIP: don’t use your SEO email account for link reinclusion request. Attracts unnecessary attention/scepticisim. Use client’s own domain. Play dumb: externally hired.
  • Be patient. Requests can take a month. Don’t resubmit over and over again, especially if your site still has hidden issues.
  • If you are denied, go and look and find out what is the problem. diversify something.

Scalable site architecture – Duncan Morris (Director at Distilled)

Duncan Morris - Scaleable Site Architecture

• Searchers are like animals: optimal foraging theory
  • suboptimal foraging behaviour results in starvation and therefore fewer offspring to follow
  • humans are basically lazy.
  • animals rely on scent. scent in the area. better going somewhere else.
  • Make sure you don’t ask for email to get the right answer. Searcher will go elsewhere [I disagree with this and so does a lot of marketing practice: you will lose some part of your audience by forcing an opt-in but with an email address you are well on the way to a sale, whereas a driveby without an opt-in is extremely hard to retain and convert.]
  • Maximise energy return: small thing or big thing. Make sure the searcher can get information quicker by continuing on that site than by moving to another site.
  • Keep a clear path to the information at all times.
• Tree taxonomy is ideal.
  • As you go deeper into the site you get more information: all cars are vehicles but not all vehicles are cars.
  • Only one copy of the major information piece.
  • Sample: Dewey decimal system. 10 classes, 10 divisions, 10 sections. 1000 sections. All books classified.
  • A book can only be in one place.
    • passing mention of Rand’s upcoming book, with covershot: The Art of SEO
• How many ways do you search for a location:
  • post code
  • landmarks
  • street names
  • tube/rail station
• Ways to identify your hierarchies.
  • user focus groups
  • keyword research gets you part of it
  • gut feel
  • intuition
  • copying from others (figure out how you can do better)
• Merge hierchies into all possible pages
• lots of possible pages
• look for nodes at the bottom of that trip
• never make a category where there is no information
  • faceted classification: chinese restaurants, soho restaurants
• folksonomy (tag clouds) must be built organically (limit it to existing information)
• relatively few nodes per category
  • pagination tends to be a bad thing
• balanced tree structure
• few levels
• pages as close to the homepage as possible
• VALIDATING SITE ARCHITECTURE
  • paper mockups checked by expert
  • breadcrumbs (do they make sense)
  • matches target keywords
• QUICK TIPS
  • lots of deep links
    • recently added
    • most popular
  • cross link between nodes
    • restaurants near here
    • people who like this also liked
  • breadcrumbs
    • gets anchor text in there
• COMMON ARCHITECTURE ISSUES
  • pages not getting indexed
    • no links in
    • too many similar pages
    • not enough link juice
  • duplicate content/keyword cannibalisation
  • lack of unique content on category pages
  • high bounce rate: poor user pages
  • category pages with no nodes: get rid of them
  • googlebot encountered an extremely high number of similar pages.
  • link building to category pages very difficult
• TOOLS TO HELP
  • meta no-index
  • sitemaps
  • canonical tag: shouldn’t need it. maybe for print pages. only used for absolute duplicates. not a rule just a hint.
  • parameter handling tool: shouldn’t be needing it. developers should have fixed it.
• In an ideal situation you don’t need to use all the crutches of no-index and canonical tags. Your site architecture should be planned right from the beginning.

Ranking Models – Ben Hendrickson (Programmer Linkscape, SEOmoz)

Ben Hendrickson - Ranking Models: Just the stats, on the rocks please.

• Placement of keyword: How does it affect rank?
  • average number of inbound links does not correspond to rank: followed links
    mean index by number of links better but still not flat: there are other things which matter
  • mozrank and external followed links have almost the same bell curve!
    • different than unique domains linking
  • keyword tag does not match rank
  • title tag matching does work but less than body or out anchors
  • putting keyword phrase in path and filename matches have a negative factor!
  • keyword in domain helps
  • h2 seem to be less useful than h1
  • problem with subdomains and paths is that a lot of sites are spammy which are doing it
• Different qualifications for different SERP position:
  • high quality links are important at the top
  • down on the second page, more links seems to help
  • alt text matching the keyword really seems to help, more than bold. sites which have alt tags have been heavily seo’d.

Live linkbuilding – Tom Critchlow (Head of Search, Distilled) & Rand Fishkin (Founder, SEOmoz)

Tom

Tom Critchlow and Rand Fishkin - Live Linkbuilding

• Example site: sixt.org
  • lowhanging fruit
    • get some links on wikitravel.org
      • none of the official wiki sites pass link juice, but wikitravel does
    • research.microsoft.com – links to avis but not six
    • enjoyengland.com – sixt is not on the page
    • edinburgh.org – sixt is not on the page
    • query on the board not shown long enough to write down: [instanbul car hire -intitle:hire
  • NICHE APPEAL STRATEGY
    • “ski car hire”
      • create niche content
  • Google local
• Example site: ARENAFLOWERS.com
  • low hanging fruit: top competitor interflora
    • visa europe
    • weddingdaze.co.uk
  • anyone linking to an expired page can link to you instead: coming from tesco.com/flowers
  • special asset: ethical supplier
    • fairflowerflairplants
  • not doing much with the weblog
  • badges – what flower are you
  • hidden meaning in types of flowers
  • data visualisaton, the colour of flowers over the year
  • flower photos, high res
  • animals that look like flowers
  • wedding directionrs: a gazillion of them

Rand

Tom Critchlow Rand Fishkin - Live Linkbuilding

• Example site: avg.com
  • #1 on google.com but #3 on google.co.uk
  • get onto news results with one of team weblogs
  • 43 million places to have a link: look for key term minus company name, i.e. “antivirus -avg” or “free software list -avg”
• Example site: brickhunter.com
  • use keyword match tool [exact!] to find the keyphrases you need
  • ehow only has five links to page: ranking on domain authority only
  • few anchor texts from high quality domain (dozen or two dozen links rather than lots of spammy index)
  • the more of a pain in the ass, the better the link
  • competitive link finder finds links in a hurry
  • do a diy weblog could help
• How to do live analysis?
  1. do a google search
  2. use Moz toolbar analyze page against number one and your own page: delta between yourself and competitor for backlinks and trust factors.
• Example site: portugese yellow pages: http://www.pai.pt
  • badges that they are listed in this directory (try this for sitereviewer.net)
  • contact your local government people to link to from lisbon tourist boards
  • use rebranding as an excuse to contact them again
    • mechanical turk (not for comment spam nor for link building): but use it to find web addresses or all the cities that you need – $40 for contact list which would take a week to build.
    • virtualpa or for mechanical turk you can use if you put in a US address
  • backlink tool: index is a month behind
  • don’t use robots.txt and meta no index (do one or the other), as you can end up knocking your site out of Google
  • when you build a site with search, take people straight to the category page: never show them the search page but take them to the category page
• Example site: Wealth management – http://www.aag.co.uk/
  • How to fix your site
    • which.co.uk good targets
    • build a manual list of financial news sites and submit to them
    • create javascript charts included in people’s pages (people will embed this kind of content)
  • outranked by aag.org (American geographers) for own name: lots of trusted links from the government
  • visualizing linkscape data
  • radar chart view of strength
  • long way to go before you eclipse collinstewartwealth.com
  • copying grey hat looks good but often ends in tears: competitor gets dropped and then so do you.
  • seo friendly pr links
    • in your pr, getting awards asking for links
  • press releases with photos with bill gates
  • brand for your name and your keyword: ie. “aag wealth management” rather than just company name.

Conversion rate optimisation – Ben Jesson and Dr. Karl Blanks (Directors, Conversion Rate Experts

Ben Jesson - Conversion Rate Experts: the squirrel passed out from heat exhaustion but Ben kept on ticking

• if you want to dominate your market, don’t start with the best seo start with best product.
• work hard, implement, be bold.
• google optimizer: great way to test. which part of the page to test.
  • 101 ways to use google optimiser: link bait going mental
    • loads of links, lots of inquiries
    • Tom Leung: Google itself contacted us: said no to Google
  • website optimizer consultant
• seomoz, seobook all clients: same process on all clients
• weight loss 67% increase
• at end of day optimisation is not about the tools: it’s about what to test.
• 50 tests on landing pages but never tested thank you pages.
• understanding why your visitors are not converting
• which changes can genuinely double your conversion rates?
• creating your experimental strategy
• objection: counter objection.
  • if they don’t trust your company, you have to build trust elements
  • if they don’t believe your product, then show advantages
  • if they don’t understand, improve comprehension
  • if you aren’t making enough offers, make more offers
• What your visitors want, and why they are abandoning.
  • tools: live chat – check livechat transcripts
  • tell a friend
  • google analytics: what page is abandoned
  • kampyle: tells you why visitors abandon website
  • perceptions: did you find what you are looking for
• seomoz customers
  • surveyed: paying members, non-paying members, cancelling members
  • learning from face-to-face selling
  • method marketing: we became the customer – get into the customer’s mindset. the best fishermen think like the fish, not like the other fishermen.
  • usability tests: used twitter to find testers
  • split tests: omniture test & target
  • tricks to get honest feedback: Not “How do you like my new website?” but “I’ve just paid a guy 20 grand to redesign my websites and I don’t like it much.”
• things to find out
  • what keeps customers awake at night
  • going through your website with salespeople
  • listening to customer calls
  • get reports on the FAQs
  • learn from face to face selling
• weight loss
  • method marketing
  • which companies had great long term rates
  • carl joined weight watchers: slimmer of the week, second of the week – able to write much better copy
  • doing bingo: played bingo. spent time with the players.
• What visitors want and what companies want
  • selling fishing boats: what the visitor wants looks at boats and maybe buy one
  • company just wants to sell one
  • but instead become trusted advisor: offer valuable free reports, offer useful selection tool, have a forum
  • give them a reason to give you their email address.
  • sell them a boat later but first become trusted advisor:
    • first give them a reason to give you their email address:
      1. free reports
      2. selection tool
      3. forum

Ben Jesson - Conversion Rate Experts

• Sales page length
  • sales pages need to be very long: even longer than face to face sale. you have to hit every objection as a single objection will blow the sale.
  • perception consumers don’t like long sales pages.
  • Amazon uses long pages and nobody even notices.
  • TIP: make your advert valuable as people will want to read on. don’t sell, add value.
• Personality
  • use video to make the sale, as rand is a very likeable type.
  • johnson box with table of contents
• Credibility
  • use references from big clients.
  • use media mentions: get credibility before starting to make the sale.
    secret weapon with brand names.
• Benefits: what do you get?
  • use tools on any website on demand
  • find out why your competitors are ranking above you and then beat them
  • learn what it takes to become an advanced seo (prestige)
  • Q & A feature on sales page
• Testimonials: essential elements
  • highlighted phrase
  • full text
  • picture
  • credentials
• You can never have too many testimonials, especially good ones.
• Call For Action:
  • reason for urgency: lock in price now.
  • improve your rankings now: call to action. surprising results with minimum amount of change, call to action.
• add a guarantee, include in call to action.
  • no minimum term – cancel any time.
• Potential upsell, variations of yes: Three options.
  • TIP: don’t add .00 unless you want the number to seem big
    • do add .00 to free report value.
    • numbers that end in nine outperform numbers that end in zero.
    • Results: 52% more customers.
• then driving more traffic at that page.
• $1 offer campaign
  • *only to existing subscribers
• How to write emails to convert:
  • write first draft in your own email client
  • write to a particular person
  • benefits
  • no waffle
  • avoid “used car salesmanship
• very personable not like a marketer
• write like a real person to a real person.
• gather objections: over 100 emails as to why they didn’t want the offer.
• post sale email campaign: 10 steps to competitive advantage: teach people to use the tools which they are trying.
• 10 times as many new clients: with trust with customer base you care about.
• doubled the number of paying subscriptions. Most people stayed. In part thanks to post-sale follow-up.
• More conversion tips at: 108 conversion tips, 14 free conversion tools

Dr Karl Blanks - Conversion Rate Experts

Some of the Q&A

SEO Expert Day One Q A

What do you look for in a junior seo?

• Richard: Attitude and aptitude: problem solving abilities, their own interests. Not experience on day one. Interactive ability with other people, outgoing communicative. They have online presence.
• Will: people who are good at searching. Know how to use google and the web. Either stats or creativity.

When you rank highly on organic side should you cut back PPC?

• Will: Not much interesting stuff written about PPC. Measuring and testing.
• Alec: Brand lift and conversion lift with both ppc and organics.
• Rand: Cannibalisation balances itself out.

How dangerous is it to have resource sections?

• Jane: Good sites link to good sites. Spammy sites, link to spammy sites.
  Only link to quality sites, it does reflect well on you.
• Ben: don’t link to bad stuff.

How should I use Facebook to build a social media campaign?

• Lucy: are you sure you want to run a facebook campaign? Develop your own stuff first. Pimp your facebook page. Blog already up and running on Facebook. Quizzes on facebook. Facebook app. TIP!: On some facebook pages you can get a live link!!!
• Jane: make sure ad only shows to target audience. women between 18–27, not men in new zealand.
• Will: Treat facebook like email.
• Denny: facebook ads are really cheap. dig down in demographics. test in facebook.
• Will: get to 100 fans, get custom url. trademark. You can only change URL once.
• Tom Critchlow: Work with trusted users in social media. Somebody with genuine friends and followers. Much more likely to do something about it. Get linkerati or facebookerati.

Ben Hendrickson - Jane Copland - Rand Fishkin

Project management tools for SEO?

• Rand: project management for seo: Raven SEO. SEO task management. Large networks.
• Jane Copland: built our own. built something yourselves.
• Will: check out buzzstream.
• Richard: don’t invest much in tools. Tab for link acquisition in Firefox utility.
• Tom Critchlow: regular project management, use any tool. seo projects wildly different from one another. Project management tools for seo set up in specific way. Not exactly your workflow. Don’t go too far down that root. Use common sense.
• Jane: All project management in Basecamp and Excel.

How big are your SEO teams?

• Jane: We are about four or five seos out of office of 15.
• Ben: We have five at seomoz. I use omnifocus.

How can you tell if a social media campaign will not work?

• Lucy: If there isn’t a community which already exists, it will make it a really hard work. tried to do a campaign for Flashpoint TV show. No online community so quizz wouldn’t work. Make sure there are people who are interested in what you are talking about.
• Jane: I wrote a post called 27 observations of a recent expat. Didn’t push it as social media. Four months later stumbleupon catches on. 2000 people per day. Less easy to manipulate than seo. Comes through after the fact.
• Danny: Can be frustrating. Last minute stuff works and huge intense projects don’t work.

End of Day One

That's the end of day one. I've been travelling and catching up today. Day two will have to wait for tomorrow.

By Alec

SEO | 6 comments

What’s wrong with Wordpress All-in-One-SEO Plugin

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

It's no secret we are seriously into Wordpress SEO. After the otherwise brilliant John Godley's Headspace killed a few too many websites on us, we decided not to use any extra Wordpress SEO plugin but just use appropriate core Wordpress functions for our SEO.

What we did was use the excerpt field for descriptions and tags for keywords.

KISS Wordpress SEO: now retired since version 2.7

Our KISS Wordpress SEO was great until Wordpress 2.7 when suddenly the excerpt field no longer existed in the page editing interface. Thanks Automattic! Our perfect workaround was now a pain in the butt.

We gave the UrbanGiraffe Headspace 2 another look, but alas it was still taking our sites down. I know Headspace 2 can work but it just didn't seem to like our core plugin install.

So we moved to the old school SemperFi's All-in-One-SEO plugin. All-in-One-SEO plugin has been around forever. It's always seemed a bit ugly and a bit clunky. But give SemperFi credit: they've been banging away on it forever and All-in-One-SEO is pretty much bugfree at this point.

What we really dislike about All-in-One-SEO is the keywords field. First, as any longtime SEO will tell you, keywords are just not that important. And as any longtime Wordpress master knows, the built-in tags pretty much have keywords covered. You just needed to add a couple of lines of code to your template and their they were.

So we don't need another interface to access keywords. We do need long titles (we used to use Joost's SEO titles plugin) and we do need descriptions. But we don't need a keyword interface.

And adding a keyword interface just confuses our clients when what we want is for them to add tags.

There is no way to turn off keywords in All-in-One-SEO and there isn't even a class on the row so there was no easy way to remove it.

We're also not crazy about automatically generated metadescription tags. We think metadescriptions should be written only by hand, as they are used to sell your post. Automatically generated metadescriptions are not really any better than letting Google and Yahoo generate them for you. For mass metadescription editing (you can see what posts and pages are missing metadescriptions and add the missing ones quickly) we use our own FV Descriptions plugin.

We thought about forking All-in-One-SEO, but due to automatic update and accidentally having our version overwritten, we didn't want to that either.

Anyway our next step was to try to contact SemperFi via their contact form and ask them to put a checkbox in their admin interface to turn off the keywords feature. I told Martin I'd give them $50 to add this feature.

Hello,

can you please put an option into new version of your great plugin which would remove the keywords field from the AI1S editing box? We believe using tags is better and the tags are used in keywords meta field anyway. The keywords field is just confusing people.

Another nice thing would be the option to disable automatic meta description generation from the Wordpress excerpt. The post either has a AI1S description entered and there is a meta description for the post or the meta description field should remain empty.

We are sending you $50 if you do these changes now. We are constantly modifying your plugin in order to make these changes (when installing, after updates), so we know it's not hard to do, we just want to make sure our changes aren't removed when updating.

Thanks, M.

We got this email back:

Please refer to http://semperfiwebdesign.com/forum/ for plugin support.  We will now only address plugin issues on our new forums so that everyone can benefit.  You may sign up for an account and post any issues you have about WordPress, plugins, themes, etc. 

If you need personal service, we can provide professional consultancy on a per hour fee basis at our standard hourly rate.

We tried calling them too. SemperFi doesn't pick up the phone either. Unfortunately, you can't contact these jokers anymore, except via the forums. Which we did.

In their forums, SemperFi were kind enough to offer at some point to add ID's to the fields of All-in-One-SEO. But what we want is a simple checkbox to remove the keywords section altogether from the post/page interface.

What we've done here is exactly that, plus we've killed the automatic updates from SemperFi. If you use our FV All-in-One-SEO plugin, you won't accidentally overwrite your copy.

If like us you have clients using Wordpress, enjoy simple SEO with FV All-in-One-SEO. No auto-generated metadescription, no inteference with tags. If SemperFi ever get their act together to add the checkbox to the admin interface to disable keywords and an option to turn off automatic metadescription creation, we will merge back our FV version into the original All-in-One-SEO.

PS. If you are into Wordpress SEO and like your metadescriptions you should might like our FV Descriptions plugin which is a mass description field editor compatible with excerpts, Thesis, both older and newer versions of All-in-One-SEO.

Download the plugins here:

FV All in One SEO Pack - an advanced plugin for your daily SEO optimization of your Wordpress site

FV Descriptions - a handy description editor good for use with FV All in One SEO Pack

By Alec

SEO, WordPress | 6 comments

Review: SEOmoz Video Training Series DVD

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

If you are already an SEO insider, you sure know SEOmoz. And if your steps are heading into the SEO world just right now, you will hear about SEOmoz many times more. These guys are among the leaders in the world of search engine optimization. Within the last decade they have created hundreds of articles, tools, guides, studies and held many conferences and seminars.

Rand Fishkin: Thinking like a search engineer

One of these seminars became the core of The SEOmoz Video Training Series. Since this DVD is quite expensive for a blind purchase, we have written short review for you. What can you expect for your investment of several hundred dollars?

Since the subtitle is SEO Basics (there is also Advanced version offered), it’s supposed you are a rookie. Maybe web designer, who finally recognized the importance of SE optimization, small online business owner, who doesn’t want to spent fortune on professionals; or CEO of a large company, who doesn’t understand why site promotion department asks for funds whoever you are, this training will lead you step by step into the world of SEO.

DVD box contains two discs, with playtime slightly over 5h 40min (official website mysteriously claims 7h...) and is divided into 8 segments (3+5). Every segment contains short introduction and then the record from seminar. The speaker is the "Wizard of Moz" personally - Rand Fishkin, one of the SEO pioneers and most recognizable experts.

Let’s introduce the segments shortly:

1. Introduction to SEO marketing
   Since you are thinking of buying this DVD, you probably understand the importance of good SE rankings. Rand is going to back your understanding with a bunch of well describing statistics. Do you know where the eye lens of tested subjects were aiming, when reviewing Google search results? Yes, you guess right, it wasn’t the 23rd position!
2. Search Engine algorithms
   No real professional will claim to have cracked Google’s (or any other search engine's) algorithm. But at least he or she can reverse engineer part of it. After a historical excursion to the old times, when sites simply packed with hundreds of keywords dominated rankings, a current top 10 list of important factors (based on opinions of the best experts) is presented. Meta tags, trust ranking, relation, popularity, keywords and many other factors are analyzed, some myths are unveiled. By the end even the audience starts to take part. I suppose this 83" long chapter is going to be the most exciting part for most of you.
   

   
   Learn by watching the Google Query log

3. SE friendly design
   SE spiders are not humans: you have to take that into consideration at all times when designing your site. That’s the main message of the third segment. Keyword incorporation, information architecture, spiders’ access restrictions, robot.txt and the always "hot" duplicate content topic are discussed. #3 is the most technical segment.
4. Keyword research and targeting
   Any discussion of keywords inevitably involves many myths from the days when their discovery was a revelation. Now any SEO worth his salt can discover all the core keywords for a domain in a few hours and in order of importance. Keywords remain one of the core factors in SEO. What are your keywords and how to target them; seasonality; keywords in title, tags, meta tags, keyword density...
5. Content creation strategies
   Here we go! White hat SEO is about having the right content on the right place in the right time. No seminar or DVD can teach you how to write the right content, but at least there can be some rules set. You should remember the basic rule - you can’t take into consideration your customers only. Your content has to be loved by linkerati too!
6. Social media marketing
   Web 2.0 develops faster than you would even dare to think. But this is the living heart of SEO. You can have a really great content, but what’s the point if nobody sees it? Social media are close to traditional offline marketing. The more innovative you can be the better. As an example is used the AVVO project (a law website), which attracted the attention of the WEB 2.0 audience simply by being sued deliberately!
   

   
   Social Media is a whole new exciting game
   for Rand Fishkin

7. Blogging & the blogosphere
   Perhaps even your grandmother has a weblog by now (and if not she reads some for sure), so naturally your business needs one too. How to optimize your blog, how to find niche topics, how to market it. The extremely popular SEOmoz blog can serve as inspiration. After the second segment of the DVD on search engine algorithms this is the best part of the DVD.
8. Analytics and metrics
   "What can be measured can be improved too." There are much more options than Google Analytics. Different types of tracking, how to use it and how to understand the results. Trying new strategies doesn’t have big value for you, unless you are able to track the outcome.

Finally, after the last segment there was broad discussion for half hour related with various topics (unfortunately sometimes too specific).

The overall technical quality of discs was standard, with good picture; sound was great, while Rand was speaking. However, the questions from audience were often hardly recognizable.

But my biggest complaint is related with the slideshow projection. There were tons of great charts, graphs and illustrations but for an extremely short time! Of course, you can pause the DVD and stare at the pictures for hours, but what’s the point, when you can’t watch while the speaker is explaining them. Some SEO ladies may be happy with Rand’s presence on the screen (but beware, he is married!), the rest of viewers would be happier with more and longer slides instead of constantly watching the lecturer.

The background music in menu is run of the mill muzak (you know that repetitive "so irritating, that it’s almost obsessive" kind of music).

This DVD will present you the world of SEO in highly professional manner, well structured from alpha to omega, but don’t expect too much! You need a good content and you need a good promotion of that content, then your site will rank well. If you understand this basic truth, maybe you can invest your time into exploring more specific fields. These discs will show you the basic rules and reliable information (that’s very important in the world of SEO full of myths and legends), but YOU have to do the work!

If you don’t know how to start SEO on your site, then check out the SEOmoz SEO Basics DVD. If you do know, stop watching and start working.

By Alec

SEO | No comments

Review: SEOmoz Advanced SEO Training DVD

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

One of the leading experts in search engine marketing offers another interesting piece for you. Recently, we have reviewed their two-disc video labeled Basics. That was a good starter for their next release. SEOmoz Advanced SEO Training Series DVD is hidden in four discs, asking for almost 12 hours of your time. Eight gentlemen and three ladies will guide you in sixteen different chapters through the world of expert SEO.

Panel discussion linking out strategies

This time there are no introductions, we go straight to the action. I have to say most of the speakers are experienced and know how to tell the message to the audience. Especially Rand and Stephan grab your attention immediately. Unfortunately, two or three speakers will remind you boring hours spent with old professors on college (especially Duncan Morris), some others (Danny Sullivan) are trying to act like on TV show so much that it's on the edge of being annoying.

It's similar with the topics. Everybody is looking for different information. What is without interest to me, might be exciting for you, however, some of the presentations go deeper and some end up just skimming the surface. For me the clear, deep and lucid presentations were about about site architecture, site review process or social networks. The opposite side is represented for example by the legal issues chapter. If it wasn't so brief, it would be very interesting. Unfortunately, the whole message of chapter can be summarized in "Be careful with legal issues, search for more information". Finally, some parts could be cut short (who of the experts needs Yahoo site explorer explained click by click? Can't we read what's on the buttons?).

While the sounds perfect and there are no microphone problems as in the previous DVD, I have to be very critical to the graphical presentation again. This time there are not so many graphs and charts to be displayed, on the other hand, lecturers do a lot of live examples. And that's a big problem – you can hear "look here…when you click there…look at the links…" but all you see is just a speaker pointing somewhere on the wall out of the picture, it's annoying, especially in chapter 6 and 14.

This DVD takes you backstage into the work of top Search engine marketers. If you ever want to be among the best in this business, you will have to do the same what can be seen in these 16 chapters. You can't expect becoming a professional in site architecture after watching 40 minutes of presentation, but you will have the picture what you must learn.

While the Basics DVD is more suitable for "home" optimizers, this pack is more valuable for SEO professionals, who are optimizing various sites for number of clients. It's a good product to have it in company's library and using it as a information crossroad in time when you are hiring tutoring colleagues or widening the field of your SEO activities. Just to be fair – there is nothing you can't find in numerous e-books, newsletters or SEO forums. It's just all packed in one place, chopped off (almost) all ballast and delivered in a user-friendly way…

To give you a basic picture of what each topics is about, here are short snippets from all 16 chapters:

DVD #1

1. Thinking like a search engineer (Rand Fishkin) The right point to begin is to understand how search engineers do their jobs. Are all search engines the same – what qualities can help you to distinguish the good one?

2. Elite site architecture (Rand Fishkin and Stephan Spencer) Perfect site architecture is the first step in SEO. Some rules are universal, but you should understand if your site is elephant or mice in the world of internet. Proper navigation, submitting sitemaps, ideal number of links – these are the main parts of the strategy for full indexation. One of the key thing to beware is duplicate content, Rand will tell you how to avoid it. Possible use of microsites is discussed with some real life examples (legendary "Why to date an unicorn"). Stephan describes another SEO phenomenon, proper use of nofollow.

Curiously enough, nofollow ended up being one of the great red herrings of SEO. Google encouraged it and then changed the algorithm so that you lose the value of nofollow links anyway and getting no value from them. Nofollow is something to get off your website as quickly as possible. This is the danger of the professional SEO - spending a lot of time chasing one's tail or reading signs in the sky, while ending up doing a good website harm.

3. White hat cloaking (Rand Fishkin) Cloaking means showing one content to human visitor and another one to SE. Wait, this is black hat?! Not always – humans are looking for something and SE spiders for something else. And there is legal way how to help them find what they want. And talking about spiders, Rand will help you to distinguish which of the visitors is real and where the spider hides.

4. Spam detection and false positives (Nick Garner). More guests, more opinions. Nick believes is heavily automatically caught, while Rand considers manual reports a necessity. Significant spam growth in recent years (in 2002 7% of all websites was spammy, in 2008 it was 40% of the whole web!), its detection is crucial for any SE. Engines are checking domains, outlinks, inlinks and evaluate them you can choose in what "vote distribution theory" you believe. Do stand out of the crowd, but be careful, don't look like spammer!

Nick garner explains web spam taxonomy

5. Legal issues (Sarah Bird) Short and brief chapter, dealing with ways how to protect your content and tips how to avoid any painful legal issues…Also IT experts have to know something about law.

DVD #2

6. Site reviews (Rebecca Kelley, Rand Fishkin ) You are revealed the standard site review process run by SEOmoz for their clients step by step - crawlability, indexing, sitemaps, hosting issues, title tags, keywords, design, and link quality. You can see professionals in action!

7. Global search (Will Critchlow and Duncan Morris) Two guests from UK are speaking about issues of global search. The main point is simple – global search is losing its importance…

8. Sitemaps and webmaster tools (Rand Fishkin and Stephan Spencer) Short explanation of webmaster tools and yahoo site explorer is followed with more interesting speech about sitemaps and long tail search traffic.

9. Crawlability (Jeff Pollard) JavaScript or flash can be so nice, but how does it work with SEO efforts? And what about iframes? Long discussion followed, proving this topic interests many professionals…

DVD #3

10. Reputation management (Will Critchlow , Duncan Morris) You can be #1 in SERP, but what's the point when people skip your site because you have terrible reputation? Good points how not to fall down and what to do if you finally manage to slip from the edge.

Will Critchlow talks about how to
normalize URLs into ASCII

11. Social networks (Jane Copland) Facebook, Twitter, Digg…hundreds of social networks, with bigger or smaller importance. First step is simple – grab your name at least! Keep up with latest issues, leave the dead networks and join growing ones, build your reputation and circles, carefully spread your mission.

12. Buying links (Seth Besmertnik) Link buying is soaked with spam, but so tempting. Discussed: how to turn link-buying white, how it can be used for deep linking.

13. Enterprise link building (Rand) Large companies have some special abilities they can use in SEO, especially press releases. However, ROI is hidden in long tails – that's the path you should follow.

DVD #4

14.Vertical search (Stephan Spencer) Vertical search is gaining importance and getting into local results is important, but still quite undiscovered process.

15. The future of search (Danny Sullivan) Danny presents the history and future of search - search 1.0 with on-page optimization, search 2.0 – the time of links and the actual one - search 3.0, the vertical search. Future is represented by search 4.0-personalized (or socialized) search, based knowledge on who you are and what you do. Search marketers-good luck!

16. Expert Q&A. The last chapter was panel discussion with 7 previous speakers. Among many questions, the most interesting one was about the quality of SEO services and future possibility of certified SEO standards.

Most useful and most interesting five chapters: 2, 6, 8, 11, 12

By Martin

SEO | 1 comment

Wordpress SEO and Dedicated IP’s

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

One of our Typepad to Wordpress clients would really like to rank higher with her nice new Wordpress weblog. She is hosted at Bluehost.com. Her IP number is 66.147.242.185. I ran a quick check to find out what other websites are on that IP.

Here is just a partial list of her neighbours:

consumersadvicemonthly.com
inkerstattoo.com
marksartori.com
mckennalaw.org
starbrighttravel.com
www.agap3.com
ww.ciafrica.com
ww.ed4wb.org
www.hittherack.com
www.juniormemorychampionship.com
www.morganjameschadwick.com
www.rentatelemarketer.net
www.rockymountaincoe.org
www.trinityschoolokc.org
www.turkishtravel.com
www.oldfortestates.com
www.hambastegi.org
www.agimaklake.com
www.tlca.org
www.turkishtravel.com
www.le-friseur.de
www.state4.com
www.calvarycampground.org
theoldfort.com
saltshakers.org.au
www.cspn.cl
www.lgmpharma.com
www.nawr.com
www.endlessblue.com
www.anternasional.com
www.haftegi.com
runebearer.com
www.developafrica.org
www.lindaq.com
www.rockwoodgarden.com
www.trinityschoolokc.org
tlca.org
www.hainsworth.com
www.spokanerecycling.com
oldfortestates.com
skymanor.com
www.piloterror.net
www.oldfortbequia.com
tw-volvo.com
www.ciafrica.com
www.hittherack.com
www.lkrobertson.com
nawr.com
www.equal-rights-now.com
percepolis.com
www.adpi.net
adrealestateinc.com
www.cwa7603.org
lollydaskal.com
aberdeeninvestment.com
www.we-recycle.com
shipnai.com
www.robertwells.com
www.danceconmigo.com
resremcon.com
www.foodini.org
www.uufsm.org
www.patrickhorsley.com
www.naccfi.com
thebeanery.com
www.arcbutte.org
www.ed4wb.org
www.summerplacecasuals.com
www.pasadenavilla.com
www.ilovejupiter.com
donleycomm.com
bequiablog.com
www.harkeytileandstone.com
www.careerdesigncoach.com
thenfi.com
www.cameopublishing.com
topshelf-fishing.com

Some of these sites look okay. Others look like real cruft.

After doing a careful Wordpress SEO tune-up, my next recommendation was that she moves to a clean dedicated IP.

It's possible to rent a dedicated IP from Bluehost for $30/year (at least it was in 2006).

Why is it important to be on a dedicated IP? Google says it doesn't matter. But Google scores everything. Even how long you have paid your domain registration (on your high value domains pay up those 10 years ahead - scammers and spammers don't). A dedicated IP costs money every month. And that means that the site owner is probably a lot more serious about the website.

Why on earth would Google give up on scoring such a great indicator of site quality?

Before anyone goes and complains that there are lots of bad sites on dedicated IP's, I would like to point out the math.

• there are many, many spammy sites on shared IP's from the likes of Dreamhost, Bluehost and far worse (out of inadequate and oversold hosts, Dreamhost and Bluehost at least take a kick at the can with customer service)
• there are proportionately few high quality sites on those shared IP's
• there are some spammy sites on dedicated IP's
• there are many high quality sites on dedicated IP's

The Google corporation is a lot better at math than Foliovision (and we have mathematicians on staff as well) and probably much better than your own company as well (unless you are a brokerage writing your own market timing software). Google have done that math and they do score IP's along with another 2000 related factors. A dedicated IP won't win the race for you, but who wants to head out the gate as the star downhill skier who doesn't handwax his or her skis?

I am always complaining about Typepad (and for good reason: Typepad customer service is terrible, the platform is deteriorating instead of improving and SixApart deliberately cripple Typepad export) - but this is one area where they score high marks. The IP's are shared but you are sharing with other high quality sites as a group. Google does give bonus marks to Typepad IP's. If you move away from Typepad but to really crappy hosting, you may even see your search engine rankings drop until you fix the hosting problem.

There are other issues with crappy oversold hosting besides a fair amount of site downtime per year and the lousy/incompetent/slow support.

One is pingtime and the other are what I like to call hosting brownouts. If you've ever been a client at Dreamhost, you know that they cram your server until it creaks. It's like the old stationwagon with everyone's bike on the roof, all the boxes crammed up to all the windows pushing down the interstate. Sure it still runs - but not very well. The underlying car might be pretty good but it's just overloaded. That's a Dreamhost and as far as I know Bluehost server as well (and the worst part is that these two guys are far from the worst of a bad lot - for a hobby or personal site, that doesn't really need to be up all the time or can occasionally be slow as it doesn't get many visitors, they are probably just fine).

Google will also score your site on speed of the hosting. And once again, fast, responsive hosting is the signal of a quality website. Is Google doing the math? You bet... with more than 200 million websites in the world to keep track of and to rank, they have to.

It's getting to the point, we recommend to almost all our clients that they join us on Foliopress.net with a dedicated IP. We host our clients on clean IP's on one of the top tier hosts. Sites load like lightning, downtime is non-existent (in three years, I haven't managed to put three hours together yet - and I am talking about total downtime including scheduled maintenance fixes). We have optimised our already top-notch hosting to run impeccably with Wordpress both cached and uncached.

I know this works. We have seen some of our clients move to us from Dreamhost for example and double their traffic in less than two months, with no other changes, mainly from being on better quality hosting and clean IPs.

Wordpress SEO Takeaways:

1. Get yourself great hosting.
2. Get yourself a dedicated IP while you are there.

By Alec

SEO, WordPress | 2 comments

&rlz= in Google referrer: Organic traffic or AdWords?

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

We have some campaigns out there on Google AdWords for which we now have some very nice organic rankings.

At the end of each month we like to calculate the number of sales of PPC versus organic for a Canadian life insurance client.

Most of our PPC results have a gclid parameter in them so it's clear as day. It's almost certain that a clean result like this one is organic:

http://www.google.ca/search?q=canadian+life+insurance

While this is definitely PPC:

http://lsminsurance.ca/calculators/canada/term-life.php?PPC-ON-ripped&type=search&keyword=life%20insurance&adid=984186361&placement=&gclid=CLmk9Iruk5YCFQhdswodiCp_FA

What about this one with &rlz= in the URL parameter?

http://www.google.ca/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4ADBS_enCA248CA248&q=greatwest

I couldn't tell. The long strange string smelled like PPC to me.

It out to be nothing of the kind. &rlz= is the string that Google uses for identifying users of Google Chrome:

You may notice a RLZ parameter in the URL when you do a Google search from the Google Chrome address bar. The RLZ parameter contains some encoded information (like when you downloaded Google Chrome and where you got it from). The RLZ parameter does not uniquely identify you nor is it used to target advertising. Google uses this information in aggregate to find out whether groups of people are using Google Chrome actively. Not all users have the same RLZ parameter. The RLZ parameter is based on where Google Chrome was download from, when it was installed, and when certain features were first used, like search.

A RLZ parameter is sent to Google with every search done using the built-in search box. It is also sent separately on days when Google Chrome has been used or when certain significant events occur such as a successful installation of Google Chrome. The RLZ parameter is stored in the registry and may be updated from time to time. The code that makes this work is not included in the open source project (http://www.chromium.org) because it only applies to the version of the browser that Google distributes, Google Chrome.

Great to know. These &rlz= searches are definitely organic then.

That Google would track you based on your browser is disturbing. However if you ever search logged in, Google can track you pretty well via your IP number, putting two and two together.

On the other hand, there are seven of us behind one IP here so the log might be a bit confusing. Still it could be correlated to exact user agent as many of my colleagues use different browsers as their primary web browser (or even a different OS).

I wonder why Google felt a need to go even further in their tracking. Just put away those images of Will Smith fleeing across bridges in Enemy of the State (blu-ray now too) and go back to your typing.

By Alec

SEO | 11 comments

SEO Images: Optimising for Google Images

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

We've been properly labelling and tagging our images for years. Some of our websites get most of their visitors from Google Images.

Google Images is the greatest SEO reserve left in the world. Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts let the cat out of the bag in 2006 and told the whole world about optimising for Google images. But it's hard work optimising images for Google Images and most webmasters still can't be bothered. There's still gold - or at least visitors - in those hills.

As Chris didn't cover the technical details in-depth, here's a step by step guide for optimising your images for Google images.

Most websites publish their images like this:

<img src="/images/192a/986943.jpg" alt="image">

Where's the problem? Missing height and width, meaningless directory name, meaningless file name, generic alt tag.

Here's what a properly formatted image should look like:

<img src="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-400.jpg" alt="Zen Fanless Power Supply" width="400" height="340" />

For bonus points link that image to a larger version of the same properly labelled image:

<a href="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-big.jpg" rel="lightbox"><img src="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-400.jpg" alt="Zen Fanless Power Supply" /></a>

For extra bonus points put that image in a h5 tag with a proper caption, close to if not identical to the alt tag:

<h5><a href="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-big.jpg" rel="lightbox"><img src="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-400.jpg" alt="Zen Fanless Power Supply" /></a><br />Fortron PFC ZEN fanless power supply</h5>

If all that sounds like a huge hassle - when you do it for every image - you are absolutely right. It is a huge hassle to optimize for Google images by hand.

Which is why we built the SEO Images (part of Foliopress WYSIWYG) plugin.

With SEO Images, all of the above is happens automatically.

You only need to give the image the correct name (words separated by hyphens) and upload to the correct directory.

Automatically all the rest is added to your image:

• alt tag
• thumbnail (whatever size you prefer)
• link to larger version image
• caption
• width and height
• lightbox

If you want a lot of visitors from Google Images, you only need to use SEO Images for a few months and you will have the rankings and the visitors to go with them.

Here are the Google Images result for our example from above, the Zen Power Supply. Of 107,000 images, spots one and two are from Foliovision.com. The large and the small version of that image.

SEO Images Google Images results

Why a few months? Historically indexing in Google Images is much slower than for the rest of Google.

Chris and Stephen, in the future, please keep our secrets to yourselves!

Also check out Problogger Formatting images for SEO.

By Alec

SEO | 28 comments

Google/Knol vs Wikipedia | Netscape vs Microsoft all over again

Sunday, December 16th, 2007

The best single website on the internet is the Wikipedia. There is more useful information and less disinformation there than on any other single substantial site.

No surprise Google puts Wikipedia in the top ten for almost everything.

Somewhat of a surprise then that Google has decided to create a pseudo-Wikipedia by the name of Knol.

Right now, it's an expert authors by invitation affair. But they plan (rather foolishly in my opinion) to open it up to free for fall (think the fall of Squidoo).

We are looking at David vs. Goliath, with Wikipedia in the David corner as the innovator facing off against massive Google. It's Netscape - Internet Explorer all over again, but this time Google is in the black outfit.

Unbelievably enough, despite being first to the party with great technology and a loyal userbase, Netscape eventually lost round one of the internet wars.

I wonder if Wikipedia will do better.

By Alec

SEO | 3 comments

Web 2.0 Product Pages Done Right

Friday, October 26th, 2007

Stephen Spender of netconcepts put up a beautiful SEO weblog entry over at cNet.

He talks about the same old tired question of ecommerce websites badly organised for SEO with:

• image navigation
• image text
• badly formatted URLs
• session-cookie dependent content
• no content

All true, but old news. Spender suggests Web 2.0 has just made it worse. Perhaps. But the real value in the entry are in the two following screen shots.

The first is a tabbed web interface of a good looking Web 2.0 ecommerce site.

Standard tabbed Web 2.0 product page

So what? Well take a look at what's under those tabs, what's under the covers.

That's what you get with Javascript turned off.

All the content of all the tabs is right there on a single content rich web page.

One could even argue that there is too much content on this page.

It would be better to have these section under different URLs making five or six pages with cleverly crafted hard URLs with interlinking anchor text in as site subsection. All that''s possible too by turning Javascript off but would require even better programming.

But the single page approache is a very good start.

Product page courtesy of the Hobitat.

By Alec

SEO | No comments

Ten Questions to Ask Your SEO

Tuesday, September 4th, 2007

Rand Fishkin pleasantly knocked the wind out of the sails of a the crowd of SEO pretenders with a quick ten question SEO quiz.

Rand believes that anyone selling SEO should be able to answer these questions:

1. What four search engines comprise 90%+ of all general (non site-specific) web search traffic?
2. Explain the concept - "the long tail of search."
3. Name the three most important elements in the head section of an HTML document that are employed by search engines.
4. How do search engines treat content inside an IFrame?
5. What resource and query can you use to determine which pages link to any page on SEOmoz.org and contain the words "monkey" and "turnip"?
6. What action does Google threaten against websites that sell links without the use of "nofollow"?
7. What is the difference between local link popularity and global link popularity?
8. Why is Alexa an inaccurate way to estimate the traffic to a given website?
9. Name four types of queries for which Google provides "instant answers" or "onebox results" ahead of the standard web results.
10.  Describe why a flat site architecture is typically more advantageous for search engine rankings than a deep site architecture.
11. BONUS (Answer this one and I'll be very impressed): Name twelve unique metrics search engines are suspected to consider when weighting links and how each affects rankings positively or negatively.

I was able to answer all of them apart from local link popularity and global link popularity and managed ten of the twelve metrics quickly.

Of course concerning link popularity I know the concept, but think of it as topical links rather than local link popularity.

How did you do? Check your own answers here.

By Alec

SEO | No comments

Link Vices: Selling Virginity

Thursday, July 19th, 2007

One of the sites I've occasionally used for picking up links for clients early in the SEO cycle is LinkAdage.

It used to be simple. Go in and pick your links - the URL would often be given. Now the URL must be kept a secret to avoid easy penalisation from Google.

And the language has changed to reflect that selling links is now considered a vice. Here is an example: PR6 Link on Great Non-Profit Website.

This non-profit site has a bunch of very nice natural backlinks from other non-profit organizations. This is a very clean site and it is the first time they are selling links.

Something like selling virginity - "first time they are selling links". Happily enough like virginity, links can be sold over and over again.

By Alec

SEO | No comments

Alexa Rank: Fact or Fiction

Wednesday, July 4th, 2007

The accuracy of Alexa rankings is always something I've wondered about.

Some of my clients have put great store by it.

After putting their SEO work on hold - "We like our rankings just fine the way they are" - two months later they start to see their Alexa rankings plummeting and are back on the telephone.

"I've seen our Alexa numbers are way down? What can we do about it?"

Of course, I'd have already seen a month ago by the traffic and the search engine referrals that urgent site promotion was called for. I always thought Alexa only provided the roughest ballpark figures.

It turns out the situation is even more dire than one would think. Alexa Rank can be wildly wrong - by a factor of ten.

But the same clients like the Alexa ranking system - it's as inherently easy to understand as a high school popularity contest. Am I more or less popular than my competitors? Am I in the top 200,000 websites in the world or not?

That should read "most popular in the English-speaking world" - Alexa doesn't matter anywhere else. There are a lot of very popular international websites with extremely low Alexa numbers.

In any case, here are the hard numbers from SEOlogs.com: Putting Alexa Rank to the Test - SEOlogs.com:

Nice work compiling these figures.

By Alec

SEO | No comments

How to Sponsor a WordPress Theme Successfully | How to audit a theme sponsorship

Thursday, June 21st, 2007

There are lots of ways to build incoming links.

For a small window of time (about six months until April of this year) sponsoring WordPress themes was a great way to get varied links from lots of different independent websites.

Of course these links wouldn't be going on top PR sites generally (custom themes) and you don't have control of the theme of the site.

On the other hand, you do have control over the anchor text, which is already not bad.

And previously it was quite inexpensive - you would pay about $40 or $50/link on a two sponsored link theme and around $70 to $100 for a single sponsored link theme.

Things have changed - most theme developers are pushing three sponsored links and are trying to get $100 or more per link.

With the inflation and feeding frenzy, a lot more lousy developers have thrown their hats into the ring, so there is an oversaturation of themes.

The developers all talk a good game of how they promote the theme on sites such as:

• http://wordpress.org(PR8)
• http://www.themesbase.com (PR4)
• http://forums.digitalpoint.com (PR7)
• http://www.wpskins.org (PR4)

Unfortunately on all or most of these high PR authority sites, your sponsored link will be nowhere to seen. Just a link to download the theme and some jpegs of the theme.

The developers will also try to shout and scream about 450 downloads, 1037 downloads for past themes. But for link building number of downloads accomplishes nothing for you.

What you are interested in is the number of sites which use the theme and include the sponsored links. For the purposes of sponsored links, a single is much better as the end user is less likely to rip out the links. By the same token it would also be better if the links were discreetly nested and not in electric green (where they are likely to attract the attention of the site owner and his visitors and finally get ripped out). An exception could be made if your site is likely to go viral and has a very wide appeal. In that case, clicks from sponsored links might actually contribute to your business. For my regional websites, we are not looking for random clicks. It will never generate any business for my clients and the more discreet the sponsored links the better.

By Alec

SEO, WordPress | 8 comments